We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Yesterday afternoon, I attended the meeting at the House of Commons that I flagged up here a few days earlier. It was a fairly low key affair, attended by about thirty people or more. Not being a regular attender of such events, I can’t really be sure what it all amounted to. Things happen at meetings that you don’t see. Minds get changed, in silence. Connections are made, afterwards. You do not see everything.
But what I think I saw was this.
The first thing to clarify is that this was the Detlev Schlichter show. Steve Baker MP was a nearly silent chairman. Tim Evans was a brief warm-up act. Schlichter’s pessimism about the world economy was the heart of the matter. He did almost all the talking, and I believe he did it very well.
It’s not deliberate on his part. Schlichter just talks the way he talks. But his manner is just right for politicians, because he doesn’t shout, and because he so obviously knows what he is talking about, what with his considerable City of London experience, and that flawless English vocabulary spoken in perfect English but with that intellectually imposing German accent. He foresees monetary catastrophe, but although he has plenty to say about politics, and about how politics has politicised money, he is not trying to be any sort of politician himself. Basically, he thinks they’re boxed in, and when asked for advice about how to change that, he can do nothing beyond repeating that they are boxed in and that monetary catastrophe does indeed loom. But what all this means, for his demeanour at events like this one, is that he doesn’t nag the politicians or preach at them or get in any way excited, because he expects nothing of them; he merely answers whatever questions they may want to ask him. He regards them not as stage villains but as fellow victims of an historic upheaval. Despite the horror of what he is saying, they seem to like that. He didn’t spend the last two months cajoling his way into the House of Commons. He was simply asked in, and he said yes, I’ll do my best.
Present at the meeting were about five MPs, besides Steve Baker MP I mean, which is a lot less than all of them, but a lot more than none.
One, a certain Mark Garnier MP, seemed to be quite disturbed by what he was hearing, as in disturbed because he very much feared that what he was hearing might be true. Mark Garnier MP is a member of the Treasury Select Committee, which I am told is very significant.
Another MP present, John Redwood, was only partially in agreement with Shlichter. He agrees that there is a debt crisis, but doesn’t follow Schlichter to the point of seeing this as a currency crisis. In other words, Redwood thinks we have a big problem, but Schlichter thinks the problem is massively bigger than big.
Redwood was also confused by Schlichter’s use of the phrase “paper money”, by which Redwood thought Schlichter meant, well, paper money. Redwood pointed out, quite correctly, that paper money that has hundred percent honest promises written on it, to swap the paper money in question for actual gold, is very different from the paper money we now have, which promises nothing. Redwood also pointed out that most of the “elastic” (the other and probably better description of junk money that Schlichter supplies in the title of his book) money that we now have is mostly purely virtual additions to electronically stored bank balances. We don’t, said Redwood, want to go back to a world without credit cards or internet trading! All of which was immediately conceded by Schlichter, and none of which makes a dime of difference to the rightness or wrongness of what Schlichter is actually saying; these are mere complaints about how he says it. Such complaints may be justified, given how inexactly “paper money” corresponds to the kind of money that Schlichter is actually complaining about. But Redwood seemed to imagine that what he said about what he took “paper money” to mean refuted the substance of what Schlichter said. Odd.
For me, the most interesting person present was James Delingpole. (It was while looking to see if Delingpole had said anything about this meeting himself that earlier today got me noticing this.) The mere possibility that Delingpole might now dig into what Schlichter, and all the other Austrianists before him, have been saying about money and banking was enough to make me highly delighted to see him there, insofar as anything about this deeply scary story can be said to be delightful. But it got better. I introduced myself to Delingpole afterwards, and he immediately told me that he considered this the biggest story now happening in the world. So, following his book and before that his blogging about red greenery, Delingpole’s next Big Thing may well prove to be world-wide monetary melt-down. I would love to read a money book by Delingpole as good and as accessible as Watermelons. If Delingpole’s red greenery stuff is anything to go by, the consequences in terms of public understanding and public debate of him becoming a money blogger and a money book writer could be considerable. So, no pressure Mr D, but I do hope you will at least consider such a project.
Do you think that the people occupying Wall Street are all idiots, parasitical permanent students, studying nothing of value, and demanding everything in exchange for that nothing? See also the previous posting, and its reference to “the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement”.
Maybe most of the occupiers are like that, but this guy seems to have grabbed the chance to say something much more sensible. Fractional reserve banking (evils of). Gold standard (superiority of). Bale-outs (wickedness of). Watch and enjoy.
What a laugh (in addition to being profoundly good) it would be if the biggest winners from these stupid demos were Ron Paul, and the Austrian Theory of Money and Banking.
I submitted a comment to this blog, “From Poverty To Power”, by Duncan Green, who is involved with the Oxfam International website. Oxfam International, I should point out, is a highly political non-government organisation that promotes what seems to be a distinctly anti-trade, anti-capitalist agenda. He supports the idea of a tax on global financial transactions, that has sometimes been dubbed a “Robin Hood tax” (rob the rich and give to the poor, geddit?). Samizdata readers will know the blogger, Tim Worstall, well, who leaves a typically well-argued comment on the piece I link to. I decided to have a pop myself. I have no idea if my comment made it on (I used a different ID). Here it is:
“I love the way that some here dismiss Tim. For those who don’t know, he is an entrepreneur and I suspect, knows more about economics and business than most of the folk on this board. His point seems to be unanswerable: taxes are a cost. Indeed, that is often their point.”
“For instance, we tax alcohol and tobacco, for example, to drive down consumption for health reasons. Policymakers support imposing tax “costs” on certain items of consumption to reduce turnover. Sometimes, it is argued by people that property should be taxed more to discourage speculation in property, etc.”
“So it seems fairly clear that taxing financial transactions will mean there will be fewer transactions overall, and that the volume will decline. This will, as Tim Worstall states, reduce liquidity, widen the bid-offer spreads in financial markets for things such as currencies, bonds, equities, commodities and so on. It will therefore be more expensive for people to obtain mortgages, buy currencies when on holiday, and so on. Of course, the tax will affect groups differently – that is another issue. But there will be considerable knock-on effects.”
“Alan Doran: It is no doubt true that some funds will migrate to “rogue” tax havens where FTT does not hold sway. Well, a less negative way of putting it is that people do business where it is cheaper to do so, ie, where there are lower taxes. That is what is meant by economic freedom.”
“An example of this is when, in the very late 60s, a change to the US tax treatment of bonds encouraged the development of an offshore eurodollar market in London. Capital migrates. If people want to stop or cut financial transactions and prevent trade, they should be more honest about it.”
The idea of a financial transaction tax, or “Tobin Tax” (named after the economist, James Tobin) has been knocking around for some time. The Economist had a good item on it back in 2001.
Separately, Oxfam’s socialist tilt has been noted for a long time.
Yes, on Tuesday 11th, at around teatime, at the House of Commons, Steve Baker MP, Tim Evans and Detlev Schlichter (the links because both of the gents in the bold and blue lettering have had recent (favourable) mentions here) will be asking: Is the global economy heading for monetary breakdown?
I’m guessing the answer is going to be: yes. Although, I’m already imagining a comedy sketch where the first two say, actually, we’ve changed our minds, the answer is no. The world’s currencies are all absolutely in the pink. Quantitative Easing is working a treat. We can all relax. And Speaker number three finds himself forced to agree with the first two. “Guys, you’re right. My book is rubbish.” If only.
Please spread the word about this event, not just so that people in the London area who are able to attend it may be persuaded to do that, but so that people all over the world may learn that ideas of monetary sanity are being argued for inside the House of Commons.
“The boost to growth from more monetary easing and more deficit spending – naturally always transitory and the source of further misallocation of resources – will be ever more faint and short-lived. Instead of igniting a new false boom, a progressively larger share of the policy stimulus will simply evaporate in the service of maintaining the accumulated misallocations, of avoiding a correction of artificially raised asset prices and of bloated balance sheets. As the manufactured recoveries get weaker, fiscal deficits get larger as a result of the combination of ongoing welfare state outlays and futile Keynesian stimulus spending.”
(204-205)
“Given the theoretical analysis in this book and the consistently devastating historical record of state paper money, it is remarkable that those who advocate commodity money today are either marginalised as slightly eccentric or made to extensively explain their strange and atavistic-sounding proposals while the public readily accepts a system of book entry money in which the state can create money without limit. The global financial crisis that commenced in 2007 is a case in point. The crisis constitutes a thorough and illustrative indictment of the alliance of state and financial industry, of a system of expanding state paper money and government-supported fractional reserve banking. Yet, the political class and the media managed to put the blame on capitalism and on greedy bankers.”
Paper Money Collapse, page 243, by Detlev Schlichter. I single out these quotes for touching on two key issues: the declining effectiveness of Keynesian stimulus spending – assuming it was ever valid in the first place – and the fact that the public, aided by the political classes, have, with some exceptions, managed to completely misunderstand our present crisis.
This book is not comforting reading, nor is it always easy to read. You have to concentrate. But it is a “must-read”. For me, one of the most valuable insights of this book is how it explains how the general price level in an economy can appear to be stable but that injections of fiat money into the system can derange relative prices for consumption, intermediate and production goods. This point is vital. It explains why those central banks, such as the Bank of England, got dangerously complacent in the 90s and noughties when the inflation targets they had been set appeared to behave. But all the while, the surges in money supply growth created a bloated financial sector and property market bubble.
He also rebuts the argument, sometimes used by opponents of commodity, or “inelastic” money, that a growing economy needs a growing supply of money to ensure stability. Untrue. At most, an expanding economy, with growing innovation, division of labour and productivity growth, should see a mild deflation over time (which is good for people who want to save by holding cash). But as Schlichter explains, there is no reason in logic or evidence why a mild price deflation should hamper economic progress once people get used to the idea that their money will buy a rising stock of goods and services through time. He uses the analogy of computers. In recent times, the hourly wages needed to buy, say, a mobile phone have slumped. Has that stopped people from going out and buying these devices? Of course not.
Schlichter’s explanation of how fractional supply banking works is crystal clear and, in my view, he explains it slightly better than say, Murray Rothbard did in his The Mystery of Banking, although the latter book is still well worth reading. And Schlichter’s style is more sober and less brash in its tone than the approach adopted by Thomas E Woods in his book about the crash, although Woods’ explanation of Austrian business cycle theory is pretty good.
All these books are useful for driving home key points about how we have arrived in our current pass. Schlichter, precisely because he used to work in the investment management business for so long, speaks not as an ivory tower academic, but as someone who has been on the practical side of finance. He knows that much of what appears to be “free market banking” is anything but; in fact, as he describes it, much of what now goes on in Wall Street, the City or wherever is a hybrid of market and state planning. In its way, it is profoundly corrupt. Schlichter also mentions how such a large chunk of the economics profession is locked into the philosophy that drives the current system – without it, many of these people would have to do something else for a living.
Perhaps the scariest part of his book is when Schlichter points out that the derangement of the capital system in the West is worse than in the late 1970s, when the-then Fed chairman, Paul Volcker, pushed up interest rates to record highs to purge some of the malinvestment and rottenness from the system. The cigar-chomping Volcker was a brave man, and he had the support of the-then presidents Carter and Reagan (Carter sometimes needs more credit than he gets). I cannot see any such central banker now receiving such support for this sort of thing. Instead, we’ve got ourselves “Helicopter Ben”.
Paper Money Collapse is one of the best books to come out of the financial crisis, maybe the best so far.
Peter Thiel, the founding CEO of PayPal, has an essay up that makes the contention that the pace of technological innovation in the West, for various reasons, has slowed. He argues that this paradoxically may explain why, in the absence of serious tech change, investors are instead drawn to the dangerous finangling of asset markets such as property, and have fallen prey to the easy charms of high leverage. It is quite an interesting idea.
Here is an interesting couple of paragraphs:
“The most common name for a misplaced emphasis on macroeconomic policy is “Keynesianism.” Despite his brilliance, John Maynard Keynes was always a bit of a fraud, and there is always a bit of clever trickery in massive fiscal stimulus and the related printing of paper money. But we must acknowledge that this fraud strangely seemed to work for many decades. (The great scientific and technological tailwind of the 20th century powered many economically delusional ideas.) Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, innovation expanded new and emerging fields as divergent as radio, movies, aeronautics, household appliances, polymer chemistry, and secondary oil recovery. In spite of their many mistakes, the New Dealers pushed technological innovation very hard.”
“The New Deal deficits, however misguided, were easily repaid by the growth of subsequent decades. During the Great Recession of the 2010s, by contrast, our policy leaders narrowly debate fiscal and monetary questions with much greater erudition, but have adopted a cargo-cult mentality with respect to the question of future innovation. As the years pass and the cargo fails to arrive, we eventually may doubt whether it will ever return. The age of monetary bubbles naturally ends in real austerity.”
It does rather go against the ideas of Matt Ridley about whom Brian Micklethwait writes below on this blog. Ridley’s take on the pace of events is far more optimistic: he does not, for instance, share the gloomy outlook on food production that Thiel makes.
This rather gloomy “are the easy economic gains gone for good?” theme was also made recently in the Tyler Cowen book, called The Great Stagnation. Here is a somewhat critical review by Brink Lindsey.
Dale Halling, an entrepreneur and scourge of things such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and anti-patent campaigners, has his own take on why the pace of innovation in the US may have slowed.
I can see why a certain gloom might set in. Many of the innovations we see today, especially in things such as consumer electronics and mobile phones, don’t have the majestic appeal of a space rocket, tall building or breakthrough in medicine. But these things are continuing: materials science, for example, which is an area that is not very “sexy” (to use one of my least favourite epithets) is full of innovation. And there are the developments in biotech and nanotechnology, to take other cases. And let’s not forget that even in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, some people claimed that all that could be invented had been.
And here is another example of the sort of concern that gets aired about where all the big inventions have gone, taken from The Money Illusion blog:
“My grandmother died at age 79 on the very week they landed on the moon. I believe that when she was young she lived in a small town or farm in Wisconsin. There was probably no indoor plumbing, car, home appliances, TV, radio, electric lights, telephone, etc. Her life saw more change than any other generation in world history, before or since. I’m already almost 55, and by comparison have seen only trivial changes during my life. That’s not to say I haven’t seen significant changes, but relative to my grandma, my life has been fairly static. Even when I was a small boy we had a car, indoor plumbing, appliances, telephone, TV, modern medicine, and occasional trips in airplanes.”
The worry is, of course, that in a world of low innovation and weak genuine economic growth, political fighting over the economic pie becomes nastier, and certain groups find life becomes very uncomfortable. Not a happy thought.
Johnathan Pearce regularly mentions here the Rational Optimist himself, Matt Ridley, very admiringly, most recently in this posting. For those who share JP’s admiration, there’s a video of his recent Hayek Lecture, which everyone who wins the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize, for the year’s best book promoting the ideas of individual liberty, gets to give.
Videos are also very handy for people like me, who only learn things half decently if told them several times, in different media, in different voices, so to speak.
I’m now watching this video at Bishop Hill, to whom thanks because this is where I learned of it.
Here’s a quote from the lecture (of the SQotD sort that we like here) that has already stood out, as I concoct this little posting:
Self-sufficiency is another word for poverty.
Maybe that’s two words. But: indeed.
As the man introducing him said, one of the things that makes Ridley particularly special as a writer is the enormous range of evidence that he brings to bear on the matter of why trade and trade networks work so fabulously well, compared to isolated individuals or isolated local communities.
The lecture lasts nearly an hour, but shows every sign so far of being very well worth it.
It would (will?) be interesting to hear what our own Paul Marks has to say to in answer to this, from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:
Judging by the commentary, there has been a colossal misunderstanding around the world of what has just has happened in Germany. The significance of yesterday’s vote by the Bundestag to make the EU’s €440bn rescue fund (EFSF) more flexible is not that the outcome was a “Yes”.
This assent was a foregone conclusion, given the backing of the opposition Social Democrats and Greens. In any case, the vote merely ratifies the EU deal reached more than two months ago – itself too little, too late, rendered largely worthless by very fast-moving events.
The significance is entirely the opposite. The furious debate over the erosion of German fiscal sovereignty and democracy – as well as the escalating costs of the EU rescue machinery – has made it absolutely clear that the Bundestag will not prop up the ruins of monetary union for much longer.
Clearly, Evans-Pritchard had in mind commentary like this (Paul Marks yesterday):
It is the end – not just the end of any prospect that people will really face up to their problems (rather than scream for endless bailouts), but also the end for any pretence that modern government is in any real sense “democratic”. It is not a sudden emotional whim of the people that has been ignored – it is the settled opinion (conviction) of the people, which has been held (in spite of intense propaganda against it) for a long period of time, that has been spat upon.
Evans-Pritchard, however, says this:
Something profound has changed. Germans have begun to sense that the preservation of their own democracy and rule of law is in conflict with demands from Europe. They must choose one or the other.
Yet Europe and the world are so used to German self-abnegation for the EU Project – so used to the teleological destiny of ever-closer Union – that they cannot seem to grasp the fact. It reminds me of 1989 and the establishment failure to understand the Soviet game was up.
So, have things changed, or have they not?
I agree about the USSR parallels in all this. But Evans-Pritchard’s reportage also reminds me rather of that vote of confidence that they had in the House of Commons, which Neville Chamberlain “won” in 1940, but actually lost.
I remember once speculating, here, there or somewhere, that one of the many things that could reasonably be said to have caused Word War 2 was the failure of any sort of German Parliament to meet – circa 1939, and say, in the manner of a British Parliament: No! No more of this! That time, the idea was for Germany to conquer Europe (and much else besides) with armies. Now the plan is and has long been for Germany to buy Europe, and give it to … EUrope. But the price is again proving ruinous and the object being purchased is a crock.
This time, the means are surely still in place, as they were not in 1939, for Germany to say: No! But, did they? And if not, will they? Over to you, Paul Marks.
LATER: Detlev Schlichter agrees with Paul, using the word Götterdämmerung. Germany, he says, is finished.
He also says this:
And one final word to my English friends. No gloating please about the clever decision to stay out of the euro-mess. You have the same thing coming your way without the euro. The coalition’s consolidation course is apparently so ruthless that every month the state has to borrow MORE, not less. Even official inflation is already 5% but pressure is growing on the Bank of England to print more money. See the comical Vince Cable yesterday, or Martin Wolf, the man with the bazooka, in the FT today. Since 1971 the paper money system has been global. Its endgame will be global, too.
Indeed.
Europe on the Brink, a Policy Brief published by the Petersen Institute for International Economics, makes for grim reading. My favourite quote from it is this subheading:
This potential break-up of the euro area is exactly what happened in the ruble zone when the Soviet Union broke apart.
“Potential”? Also, I think, for “euro area” read state-backed but not gold-backed currencies everywhere.
But the USSR comparison is spot on. When the USSR disintegrated, this was rightly hailed as a triumph for capitalism, but not rightly hailed as the triumph of capitalism. There were other walls yet to fall, other statist follies yet to be destroyed. The commanding heights of the economy used to be thought of as big companies that did physical stuff to physical stuff. 1991 was the date when the idea that governments should micro-manage such enterprises got its comeuppance, and the torrent of high quality stuff that has gushed forth ever since continues, as yet, unabated. But the real commanding heights, the loftiest and most commanding of all, the politically (mis-)managed currencies of the world, are only now collapsing.
Think of our current travails as the unfinished business of the twentieth century.
As has been widely reported, Standard and Poor’s (S&P) credit rating agency is under criminal investigation for the “crime” of rating various financial instruments as low risk (“triple A”) when, in fact, these financial instruments were based on worthless mortgages (worthless as the original home loans were paid to people who had very little chance of ever paying them back).
No doubt S&P did not do their job of rating risk very well. After all S&P is part of a de facto government established cartel of ratings agencies (the vast level of regulation makes very difficult for new companies to compete in the credit rating business) and the government wanted its “affordable housing” policy to continue and part of that was for the original lenders (the banks and other such who had made loans to people who could not pay them back – partly to avoid legal action under the Community Reinvestment Act and partly because the Federal Reserve system was making lots and lots of cheap credit money available and it had to go somewhere) to be able to pass on the loans as securities and other financial products.
Also, of course, S&P (like the other ratings agencies) is paid by the people it is rating (not the people who want to check credit worthiness) so it has a perverted incentive to not look too closely at the financial products it rates – and the mortgage backed financial products (i.e. the pass-the-parcel-before-it-blows-up products) paid very well – especially as financial people (as financial people are apt to do) were using the mortgage based financial products as the basis for pyramid schemes – building vast constructions of debt upon them.
However, every single word of the above could be applied to the larger “Moody’s” Credit Ratings agency. For example, it was the credit rating enterprise that rated the (utterly demented) government backed (and government created) “Fannie Mae” and “Freddie Mac” (the organizations that own most American home loans) as perfectly safe.
Yet Moody’s is not under criminal investigation – why not?
By an odd coincidence S&P downgraded American government debt about a month ago – and (after observing the hostile reaction of the American government) Moody’s chose not to. Could this (as some have claimed) be the latest example of the “Chicago Way” where commercial “friends” get rewarded politically – and “enemies” get punished?
The existing regulations already gave the government (via such agencies as the SEC) vast (and, to a great extent, arbitrary) power. But the passing of “Dodd/Frank” (an Act of Congress named after, arguably, the most corrupt members of the Senate and the House of Representatives at the time) completed the process of turning the American financial system and markets it a political toy – totally under the control of the government. And presently it is a very corrupt government – dominated by Chicago Machine people (from the President down).
However, it is hard to have much sympathy for the financial companies and traders – they are, after all, addicted to government subsidies and have long stopped being anything to do with “free enterprise”.
For example, whenever a vast new government subsidy orgy is announced (such as a new round of funny money creation by the Federal Reserve – or a promise of a vast bailout for European banks) the markets go up not down. The long term is of no interest to most players on the market – they care only about the new money that government creates (from nothing) and their personal chances of getting some of it.
They (most of the financial elite) and the governments (for the other governments are much the same as the American one) are made for each other – it is just a shame that the rest of humanity has to live on the same planet as these people.
“The great problem of recycling anything is that whatever it is that you’re after might be extremely dispersed. You can end up epending more energy, more labour, in trying to oncentrate it enough to recycle it than you would expend by simply digging up some new stuff.”
Tim Worstall on the issue of recycling rare metals. The point he makes very well, in my view, is the issue about the scarcity of time. It takes oodles of time for people, even in their own households, to recycle stuff and sort it out, as opposed to acquiring material elsewhere. Now, if the value of the recycled stuff rises sufficiently to make it worth the while of people to recycle it, or the availability of dumping grounds for unwanted stuff declines sharply, the of course recycling will increase.
Everything has a cost. And time is one of the costs that legislators frequently don’t stop to address.
My only surprise is that an article as justifiably angry as this has not been written sooner. Here are Peter Oborne and Frances Weaver, in the latest edition of the Spectator. They have also penned an item called Guilty Men, published by the Centre for Policy Studies.
There are several institutions that are targeted. And I almost wonder if the authors of the article have been channelling our own Paul Marks on the subject of the Financial Times. Paul has written about the Economist also with venom. An example of what annoyed Paul about the Economist, is linked to here.
Here are the paragraphs that stood out for me in the Spectator article:
“Meanwhile the pro-Europeans find themselves in the same situation as appeasers in 1940, or communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are utterly busted. Let’s examine the case of the Financial Times, which claims to be Britain’s premier economic publication. About 25 years ago something went very wrong with the FT. It ceased to be the dry, rigorous journal of economic record that was so respected under its great postwar editor Sir Gordon Newton.”
“Turning its back on its readers, it was captured by a clique of left-wing journalists. An early sign that something was going wrong came when the FT came out against the Falklands invasion. Naturally it supported Britain’s entry to the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1990. In 1992, under the slow-witted editorship of Richard Lambert (in a later incarnation, as director general of the Confederation of British Industry, Sir Richard was to become one of the most sycophantic apologists for Gordon Brown’s premiership), it endorsed Neil Kinnock as prime minister. It has been wrong on every single major economic judgment over the past quarter century.”
“The central historical error of the modern Financial Times concerns the euro. The FT flung itself headlong into the pro-euro camp, embracing the cause with an almost religious passion. Doubts were dismissed. Here is the paper’s supposedly sceptical and contrarian Lex column on 8 January 2001, on the subject of Greek entry to the eurozone. ‘With Greece now trading in euros,’ reflected Lex, ‘few will mourn the death of the drachma. Membership of the eurozone offers the prospect of long-term economic stability.’ The FT offered a similar warm welcome to Ireland.”
“The paper waged a vendetta against those who warned that the euro would not work. Its chief political columnist Philip Stephens consistently mocked the Eurosceptics. ‘Immaturity is the kind explanation,’ sneered Stephens as Tory leader William Hague came out against the single currency. Even as late as May 2008, when the fatal booms in Ireland and elsewhere were very obviously beginning to falter, the paper retained its faith: ‘European monetary union is a bumble bee that has taken flight,’ asserted the newspaper’s leader column. ‘However improbable the celestial design, it has succeeded in real life.’ For a paper with the FT’s pretensions to authority in financial matters, its coverage of the single currency can be regarded as nothing short of a disaster.”
An interesting side point is that the authors seem to take it as read that individual countries should, as matters of sovereignty, have their own currencies. What the authors don’t state – and I don’t know their views on this – are their opinions on fiat money per se. It is, after all, not much consolation to supporters of free markets to replace one dud monopoly money system with a network of national monopoly fiat moneys instead. What we need is actual competition between and even more crucially, within countries. Remember the old idea of a hard money “parallel currency” that the likes of Nigel Lawson, former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, toyed with?
Transnational currencies such as the euro may indeed be disasters waiting to happen. But national currencies can often blow up too, or devalue slowly but insidiously. That point needs to be made loud and clear. The end of the euro may be cause for grim satisfaction in some corners but that is not the only kind of economic folly out there.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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